After Dante there is one thing we shall never find in Italian poetry, and we do not find it in Petrarch. We shall find taste, melody, beauty of expression, descriptive power, but we shall not find deep passion, uncontrollable rapture, soarings of sublime inspiration. Yet, for what Petrarch’s sonnets are, they are perfect. His _Canzoniere_ contains works of graceful thought or of tender feeling, of brilliant and polished expression, such works as a more fertile Tennyson might have written in that age; but they have no claims to be more. The impression, however, must not be left that Petrarch’s poetry was all in sonnets. To this Sicilian form he joined a series of larger and freer _Canzoni_ after Provençal example, and also _Trionfi_, or allegorical visions, dealing more after the fashion of Dante with love, death, chastity, and other abstracts. * * * * * From the _Divine Comedy_, through Petrarch, we come down to the Human Comedy of Boccaccio. Giovanni Boccaccio, the younger and more worldly-minded contemporary of Petrarch, the son of a Florentine merchant and a Paris _grisette_, educated at Naples and domiciled in his maturer years at Florence, is best known as the author of the first great prose work of Italy, the _Decameron_. In the year 1348 a terrible plague befell the city of Florence. Boccaccio, after opening with a powerful description of this pestilence, represents seven young ladies and three cavaliers as retiring to a delightful villa outside the walls in order to escape the contagion and their responsibilities, and to pass the time in idleness and amusement. Each of the ten persons relates ten stories, and thus we obtain a hundred short tales (or “novels,” as they then called them), tales pathetic, sportive, or licentious. We are not greatly concerned with these stories; they are not original, but are taken from current recital, from Oriental sources, from French _fabliaux_, and from scattered productions or collections of insignificant Italian writers, such as are found in the crude shapes of the _Cento Novelle_. The notion of a series of stories strung into some sort of connection with each other is as old as the _Book of Sinbad_ or the _Seven Sages_. Boccaccio’s chief merit is that he wrought such stories into artistic tales full of the varied life of his time, and gave them literary shape in language pure, elegant, and sonorous, if, perhaps, often too diffuse. It is he who sets the example for his immediate follower Sacchetti and for those novels of Bandello or Cinthio which were current in English in the Elizabethan age, and which so often supplied our dramatists, including Shakespeare, with plots. It particularly interests us that the plan of Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, where each pilgrim is to tell the same number of stories, is directly or indirectly borrowed from Boccaccio, as indeed are some of the tales themselves, besides hints hard to specify.